Rich Communications Suite (RCS) Release 1 was first published in December 2008. RCS was defined by the GSMA, an association of telecommunications operators and related companies, with the aim of producing an umbrella of advanced communication services prioritising the interoperability of the services across network operators and handset manufacturers. RCS Release 1 established the main services and components to be used as part of RCS such as enhanced address books and chat, for example, instant messaging. RCS Release 2 was published in June 2009 and expanded Release 1 to cover Broadband Access (BA) devices such as PCs connected over Wi-Fi in addition to the mobile telecommunications devices supported by Release 1. Release 3, in addition to other enhancements, included functionality that advanced communication services, such as video, did not require a voice call to be initiated prior to the initiation of the advanced communication services, whereas this had been the case in previous releases.
As mentioned above, RCS defines advanced communication services for adoption. It defines the profiles and implementation for adoption of existing standardised services as defined by various standardisation bodies, such as the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) or Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The communication services defined by RCS include chat, file transfer, image share and video share (one-way and two-way). Other functionality defined in RCS includes enhanced address book (EAB), including service capability and social presence, network address book (NAB), including remote back up and restore and enhanced messaging, including message history.
As part of the EAB, RCS includes facilities for social presence. Social presence is a status indicator that displays the availability of a person to communicate. It can vary from the simplistic such as red-amber-green coloured indications, to the complex such as the Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leverage Extensions (SIMPLE) and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) both of which are defined standards and are widely adopted. Social presence is indicated by the user and often cached at a network level for others to easily identify the presence status indicated by the user. Social presence is not autonomous but requires publication of the social status by the user client.
Many of the standardised communications services adopted by RCS have been in existence for a considerable amount of time, some being implemented in a variety of ways by different operators and manufacturers. One example of this is two-way video sharing or video calling which has been commonplace in telecommunications since the widespread usage of 3G handsets.
Despite widespread availability, video calling has not been adopted by the average consumer. One suggested reason for the consumer's apparent lack of interest in the technology is the inconsistency of service and the user's confidence in potential service completion. A user will typically initiate a video call hoping that the contact is online, has good connectivity for a high quality call, is available to transmit video and has video capable hardware.
Video calling has a high average data transfer rate and thus requires good connectivity for high quality of service. Additionally, there are currently a small number of handset models and therefore contacts which are equipped for video calling. There is no currently available method to establish, prior to call initiation, the potential probability of successful call completion and call quality.
Although the above has been described in terms of video calling, it is clear that the problems apply to any communication service that requires a certain level of network connectivity and capability. The user has no idea whether the recipient has a device capable of communicating using the service and whether or not the device has sufficient network quality to receive the service.
Some attempts have been made to address this problem. For example, WO2006/052176 describes a mobile telephone communications system in which, during an ongoing call over a circuit-switched network between first and second terminals, when a terminal detects that packet-switched communication has become possible, for example due to moving location, corresponding capability messages are exchanged between the terminals and the possibility of using multimedia services are then indicated to the terminal user. In a similar manner, WO2006/121272 describes an in-call change in the state of first user equipment causing the transfer of a communications list to a second user equipment. WO2006/137646 and US2008/0317010 describe other similar examples.
Modern video services such as Google Talk™ and Apple FaceTime® offer video calling and other advanced communication services on mobile devices. These services require registration and so are not available to any contact on a mobile device and are closed services, i.e. they are not interoperable with other handsets produced by other manufacturers. These services provide minimal online/offline indications along with a modicum of social presence information. A user of the service faces the same issues as those occurring with 3G video calling where the systems are not able to identify, nor guarantee, quality of service.
In summary, in known advanced communication services, the user must assume the communication is viable and is only made aware that this is not the case upon communication failure. This is an ongoing and significant barrier to the use of advanced communication services. The present invention is aimed at addressing this and its related problems.